I would like to know if there is a newer version of MARP.DAT than the one I could download, that is from May 2014. That means all hiscore later than that aren't on this file.

I use Emuloader 8.1.7 and MAME 0.176b_64bit.

In EmuLoader I choose show MARP.dat in top of douments, then I can view all games ultimate MAMEscore, but they're years old. A temporary solution I found was for every favorite game, to do a search in MARP, Print Screen, open Irfanview, insert, mark, crop, save in gamename in a suitable folder, that shows the MARP-score as a picture beneath the Snap and my personal score picture. That is time consuming and my Snaps are way too small, because of the need to show the MARP snap.

Is there a newer file? I would love to use it and find it very relevant, as it brings MARP and MAME so much closer, also for not-so-good players, we have some real, higher scores to aim at.

I suggest if it's not maintained, that someone does it / is allowed to do it. Would it be possible to do some kind of automatization of the file from MARP database?

I'll try to attach images of my frontend, that shows you what I mean, these game (and others) have MARP-scores newer than 2014, just look at the inserted MARP-scores (to the right) for the game and the scores from MARP.DAT, found below, they don't match.

Sadly I can't seem to make the new marp.dat to show any info in emuloader. When I overwrite the old file with the new, reboots emuloader, the marpinfo-view is gone, when I overwrite the new file with the old file, the info shows up again.

(And I have never viewed marp.dat in a mamegame, so I don't know if it's supported anymore, but neither the old or new marp.dat shows up in external .dat view in UI in mame?)

CiroConsentino wrote:The file is saved as "Unicode" format. If you convert it to "UTF-8" format (using Notepad), it works and Emu Loader can process it correctly.
Sadly, I can't find a solution to make my frontend support files encoded with Unicode format. They have to be saved in "UTF-8"...

Thanks for the heads-up on the file format. I've adjusted my script to generate a UTF-8 file instead. Please try the attached, updated version. I went with a full Unicode file initially as some of the game names won't work with an Ansi file format due to using extended character set characters, but UTF-8 should work just as well.... hopefully.

The new file works.
Always use UTF-8 to save your files, not Unicode.
Why ? I found this about the difference between Unicode and UTF-8.

"Unicode" is a unfortunately used in various different ways, depending on the context. Its most correct use (IMO) is as a coded character set - i.e. a set of characters and a mapping between the characters and integer code points representing them.

UTF-8 is a character encoding - a way of converting from sequences of bytes to sequences of characters and vice versa. It covers the whole of the Unicode character set. ASCII is encoded as a single byte per character, and other characters take more bytes depending on their exact code point (up to 4 bytes for all currently defined code points, i.e. up to U-0010FFFF, and indeed 4 bytes could cope with up to U-001FFFFF).

When "Unicode" is used as the name of a character encoding (e.g. as the .NET Encoding.Unicode property) it usually means UTF-16, which encodes most common characters as two bytes. Some platforms (notably .NET and Java) use UTF-16 as their "native" character encoding. This leads to hairy problems if you need to worry about characters which can't be encoded in a single UTF-16 value (they're encoded as "surrogate pairs") - but most developers never worry about this, IME.

Now, I don't know if it's a lot to ask, but could it possibly be official and updated on a regular basis, like maybe 4 times a year + / - ?

And I don't know who to ask...

But, thanks for updating the file

I think you had the most recent automated version at the beginning of the thread. For many years, it used to be automagically updated here: http://replay.marpirc.net/marp.dat
When I was making my ML(mameload) front-end, I was the one to initially request its daily automated creation back in 2007. The only one at the time was 'story.dat' which wasn't all that much for game coverage or scores.